


the numbered days are on your skin

by effie214



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 16:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/effie214/pseuds/effie214
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Smillan Secret Santa exchange on Tumblr. Prompt: fairy lights, mistletoe, eggnog<br/>Originally posted as "11:59."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the numbered days are on your skin

She makes her decision at the airport.

(Well, that’s not  _quite_  true; she’d made her decision so long ago that she doesn’t remember a time when it wasn’t a foregone conclusion, but there’s a distinct difference between admission and action, and now, months after she’d heard her final “cut” on Amelia Pond, it’s time for her to write her  _own_  life’s story.)

She’s surrounded by the antithesis of the season; sun and warmth juxtapose holly and ivy, and it makes her head spin a little bit. But her steps are determined, and the smile on her face genuine as she approaches the British Airways counter at LAX. She’d come to the States to start down a new path, one she’d thought she could walk alone, but as the days turned to weeks and melted beneath tides and sand into months, she’d realized that while she  _could_  do it on her own, it made very little sense indeed to keep at it when it wasn’t what she wanted.

In between the meetings and auditions and spreading her wings, there was something missing.

Some _one_ missing.

The gate agent recognizes the excitement in her eyes rather than her face, and as he takes her passport, asks with a little wink, “Going to see someone special?” 

“That depends on you, Andrew,” she replies with an unbridled grin, and an electric feeling threads through her veins like ribbon on wreath. She is breathlessly invigorated, which makes very little sense, given the huge step she’s about to take, where the desired outcome is about as up in the air as the airplane going to take her home.

But certainty has washed over her like the waves that crashed onto the shore mere blocks from her apartment in Venice since she’d been sitting in her kitchen, tea made but cooling in her distraction, sliding a finger across the photos on her iPhone,  eyes intent and focused on one face and once face alone.

She’d intended for coming stateside to allow her to spread her wings; to run at her own pace and explore at her own discretion. And she had, but there was always something missing; among the sand and sunshine, she’d lived a very black and white existence, lined just so, and she missed the one person who had always pushed her boundaries and added colors to her life no one else had ever seen before, and she’d been forced to ask herself if there was a point to running unless she had the companion of her choice beside her.

Roles reversed and yet so perfectly cast, like there was only ever one answer to a question that didn’t even need to be asked.

“Oh, pressure,” he replies, tapping on his keyboard. “What do you need to make your holiday merry and bright?”

“A change.”

They both know she’s not talking about her destination, and Andrew nods. “Where are we going?”

There’s only one answer. “Home.”

He seems to know exactly what she means without further explanation, and it only solidifies the calcified conviction in her bones that she’s doing the right thing. “You want Gatwick or Heathrow?” He asks, peering down at his screen for availability.

“Whichever gets me there faster.” She has to chuckle to herself. Matt has always been the frenetic one, the one that can’t be tempted or fenced by convention or expectation, and she feels like she’s lived so much not in his world but in one they’ve created together, that moving at any other pace feels disingenuous.

He’s her phantom limb; that part of her that she feels most acutely when it’s missing. It’s an ache for which there is no cure — except perhaps the promise that this is the last time they’re going to be apart by choice.

“If you run, you can make the next flight to Heathrow. It leaves in 45 minutes.”

She reaches down to pull out her credit card to pay for the change fee, but Andrew shakes his head, printing her boarding pass and writing his email on the outside of her ticket holder. “Just let me know how it goes, and promise me that if he’s an idiot, you’ll kick him in the crown jewels.”

She laughs. “He’s always been an idiot.”

He wags a finger at her. “But that’s why you love him.”

The world decelerates a little bit then, and she sways at the slowdown. She ducks her head and nods to herself but doesn’t reply; it’s silly, but the first time she wants to say those words aloud, she wants to be face to face with the person to whom they’re meant to be said.

With a knowing and encouraging smile, Andrew hands her her ticket. “Merry Christmas, Miss Gillan. And good luck.”

She apologizes profusely to her seatmate the entire flight for her unending state of nervousness; her right leg bounces in anticipation as the miles scream by beneath them. She wills herself to fall asleep, but every time she closes her eyes, memories dash across her eyelids. That first day on the beach, where she slung her arm across his shoulders like she’d planned on doing it every day for the rest of their lives. The first trip to Trogir, when he’d knocked gently on her hotel room door at half past three in the morning, knowing she too was too excited to sleep, and they’d snuck out, exploring the town and each other until the sun had come up over the harbor.

Their adventures on the press tour for the airing of the first episode, so many months in to filming, where this attraction that had been so electric and had become too increasingly difficult to ignore had finally morphed gently from  _what if_  into  _why not_ , and where they’d spread out in the back of the bus, each watching their own episodes of the show until the  _Confidential_  cameras went off and Beth fell asleep, and propelled her into his embrace, resting her cheek against his shoulder and his arm wrapping comfortably around her shoulders.

And finally, New York, where it began and ended in earnest, when they’d ridden the subway uptown and down and he’d leaned in to kiss her until a taxi horn blew and reset the clocks to zero; where she’d sat on a bench without a script but with words seared onto her heart as deeply and meaningfully as she wished to count their days together on her skin, and when he’d stood up and kissed her on the cheek in both goodbye and what she’d hoped was a hello as well.

By the time they land and she’s standing in line at Customs, those words —  _You’re my best friend. My life is better because of you, and it’s divided between before I knew you and after. You’ve taught me how to love, and by extension how to live. I know this is not goodbye, because this is as never-ending as it gets. I waited a lifetime for you, and it’ll take you at least ten to get rid of me_  — are echoing in her head like a battle cry, and there’s a wistful, impatient smile on her face as she climbs into a cab.

“Ormond Street Hospital,” she asks the driver in the most even tone she can manage, and as the streets fly by, the coolness of the morning is completely lost on her. She knows he’s there entertaining the kids, handing out presents and reading  _The Night Before Christmas_ , and the need to see him overwhelms any sense of propriety or timing.

One of the producers recognizes her in the lobby, and after a huge welcome home hug, Karen’s in the lift armed with a visitor’s badge and a deafeningly loud thumping heart. It only seems fitting that the nerves set in  _now_ , after they’ve both come so far and after so much time. Then again, they’ve never been conventional, and she sure as hell isn’t expecting them to start anytime soon.

The common room is right off the nurses’  station, and is decorated with white, blinking fairy lights. There’s a huge tree in the corner, decorated haphazardly but enthusiastically, and despite the wheelchairs and steady thrumming of important machines, it feels like the spirit cannot be contained. Everyone’s donned a paper crown and been given a cup of eggnog — non-alcoholic, of course — and Matt has elected to eschew the large chair set up on a riser for him in favor of sitting in the middle of a circle of children who are enraptured by his every word.

She arrives toward the end of the story, oddly moved by the emotion and emphasis with which he recites the story, and looks at the children’s faces, eyes wide as the magic of the season welcomes them like the old friends they are.

They all applaud when he finishes, and Karen watches as he spends time with every child and their family, crouching down to those in pushchairs and taking their tiny hands in his. She’s seen how good he is with kids, but there’s something even more touching about the scene as it folds out in front of her. There’s a simplicity to it; a sense of safety in an unsure world, and she can tell Matt’s getting more out if it than the children. They say words on a page and battle pretend things, while these children face a war day in and day out, and it is they who are the inspiration, not the other way around. Her smile widens in to an unburdened grin when a little girl’s mum points out the mistletoe hanging from the top of her daughter’s IV pole, and Matt presses a kiss to her cheek and then whispers something against the crown of the girl’s head. (She turns away when he gives the mother a hug, too; there is something far too personal in the embrace for anyone to interlope upon it.)

It takes him close to an hour to speak with not only the children and their families, but the doctors and nurses, and Karen can tell he’s tired, but there’s an exhilaration in his step that only she can identify. She knows he’ll take so much from this meeting; a sense of determination and gratitude few other experiences could give him. And while she knows he would have eventually called to tell her about it, the fact she can be here to witness it is the first present she’s received this season.

She has to chuckle to herself when he threatens to pass by her without actually noticing her, his mind so preoccupied by the uplifting he’s just experienced, and she does what she flew thousands of miles to do: she reaches out and grabs him by the hand.

He stops short, knowing it’s her without turning around, and when he does, she’s surprised to find tears in his eyes and a disbelieving smile on his face.

Her voice is low, for him and him alone. “Happy Christmas, Smithers.”

He doesn’t seem to know what to do, seemingly caught between wanting to pull her into his arms and never let go or just stare at her until it sinks in that she’s actually there; that she’s actually  _real_ , and she just grins unabashedly at him. Finally, he reaches out and cups her face, running his thumbs along her cheekbones. “God, I’ve missed that face.”

There’s no sense of teasing or irony to it, and they both take a step forward. His arms wrap tightly around her waist and hers thread around his neck, and she just drinks him in. Her fingertips find the unruly hair at the nape of his neck and she threads them through the strands. She feels him press a kiss behind her ear and she shivers, a move punctuated by his half-victorious, half-amused chuckle. He rubs her back a few times and then pulls away, staring her right in the eyes. “You’re home for good, yeah?”

There are a hundred pairs of eyes on them, and it’s not the scenario she’d had in mind, but neither was this existence or this man.  She pauses a minute, clears her throat slightly, and squeezes his hipbones with her fingers. “If you’ll have me.”

His eyes sparkle as brightly as the fairy lights that surround him, and he moves in for a kiss, but then thinks better of it. Instead, he grabs her hand and presses his mouth to her knuckles, whispering against them, “Don’t move.”  Then he takes the bag of presents from one of the Ads and lets out a loud, jolly “Ho, ho, ho!” and any public display of affection is put on hold.

She’s waited a long time for this. She doesn’t mind waiting a little longer.

One of the kids eventually recognizes her and asks if she’s coming back to the show. She kneels in front of him and says, “Not on-screen, but the Amy will always be in the TARDIS.”  She taps him gently on the nose. “You just have to know where to look.”

He seems appeased with that, but she’s rather happy that she wasn’t.

It takes them another hour and a half to get out of there, and blessedly, the crew and their handlers let them  ride to the lobby by themselves.  The long-awaited first kiss waits still longer, because they just need to breathe each other in; drink in the second chance neither were ever quite sure they’d get. He cradles her against him, threading his fingers through her hair, and it feels like puzzle pieces she didn’t know she was missing are coming together of their own volition. She was never broken, but she’s never felt so whole as she does in that moment.

The lift dings them back to reality. He presses a swift kiss to her temple — a promise for so much more just a little bit later — and they separate, conscious of the little privacy they have left and the importance of holding onto it like a treasure.

He insists she join him in the BBC approved car, and an assistant somehow hands both of them some hot chocolate. It’s a frame around the sketching of their beginnings, and they settle against each other instead of the cloth that lines the backseat, and they drive through London.

Somewhere in the world, the clock strikes twelve, and she leans over to kiss him gently, thoroughly, longingly and briefly, putting action where words should have been, and he whispers  _finally_  against her lips.

 _Better late than never,_  she answers, and he smiles in agreement.

“Happy Christmas,” he whispers just slightly louder, brushing his mouth against hers again.

“Yes, it is,” she replies, and it’s the first of many they spend together.


End file.
